An analysis of order review

Order Review/Release (ORR) activities have mostly been ignored in past job shop research. In the majority of these studies, arriving jobs are immediately released to the shop floor without considering any information about the job and the system status. In practice, however, jobs arriving at the shop are first collected in a pool and then released periodically according to some release criterion. Although practitioners use ORR mechanisms to improve shop floor performance, researchers have found limited supports for the use of these input regulation policies. In this thesis, we reexamine the problem in a capacitated system. Specifically, we compare the performances of the ORR policies in a job shop with finite buffer capacities and material handling considerations. A new ORR mechanism is also proposed and compared with other methods.